Irony Comprehension in Monolingual and Bilingual Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study examined verbal irony comprehension in monolingual and bilingual autistic children, focusing on irony recognition, intention understanding, cue use while deciphering ironic meanings, and error patterns. A low-verbal, multimodal task was used to minimize linguistic and metalinguistic demands. Measures of language ability, Theory of Mind (ToM), executive functions, and cue use were included. Results showed that bilingualism did not negatively affect irony comprehension, as bilingual autistic children performed comparably to monolingual autistic children and showed no disadvantage relative to bilingual typically developing peers. Across groups, ironic criticism was understood more accurately than ironic praise. Irony recognition was associated with executive functioning, specifically inhibition. In autistic children, intention understanding was primarily predicted by second order verbal ToM and, to a lesser extent, sentence comprehension. Cue analyses revealed that contextual information and facial expressions were the most frequently used sources of information, whereas facial cues were predominantly used by bilingual autistic children in ironic praise. Prosodic cues were rarely reported across groups. No group differences emerged in error patterns. Overall, the findings indicate that bilingualism is not detrimental to irony comprehension in autism and highlight the importance of socio-cognitive, language, and executive mechanisms in pragmatic processing.